by Carmen Amato
“I wasn’t sure.” Emilia stood to face him. The showdown was coming and she had to be ready.
To her surprise Silvio squatted down by the jug, popped off the top and pried the plastic bottle apart lengthwise. The thing split like a clamshell. “Clever,” he said. “Hide drugs or whatever in it, cap it, drive it anywhere you like.”
Rico crossed his arms and looked squarely at Silvio. “Guy who owns this factory is the same one whose kid was kidnapped.”
“The kid you and Cruz found,” Silvio said to Rico across the expanse of concrete and plastic jugs.
“Yeah.”
Their words echoed in the strange emptiness of the plant. Fluorescent light shimmered off the polished aluminum walls of the huge water tank.
Emilia realized that Fuentes had his gun out. He was still by the doorway holding it loosely by his side as he watched Rico and Silvio’s exchange.
“Put the gun away, Fuentes,” Emilia called. “There’s nobody here.”
Fuentes laughed shakily and holstered the gun. “A weird place, eh.”
☼
There was nothing more to see. The office filing cabinets were empty. They stacked the jugs, reset the locks and drove back in silence, each with their own thoughts. When they got back to the station it was early evening. Silvio parked in the detectives area. Rico said something about food and he and Fuentes spilled out of the car.
Emilia had been sitting in the backseat behind the driver and when she made to get out of the car Silvio bulled his way into the backseat with her. She heard the locks click. “We need to talk,” he said.
“Sure.” Emilia looked around as her heart crawled into her throat. Damn Rico. He and Fuentes had gone into the building. The security guard was in his shack.
“Why did you go to my house?” Silvio growled.
“What?” Emilia blustered. She hadn’t been ready for that. “Who says I was anywhere near your house?”
“My wife is pretty accurate in her descriptions.”
“I . . .” Emilia faltered. Silvio was calm but obviously angry. Emilia felt the reassuring pressure of her gun under her jacket.
“You got the phone records,” Silvio said flatly.
Emilia decided to take the opening. “You called Lt. Inocente the night of his death,” she said. “From your cell phone. Twice.”
“You think I killed him?” Silvio asked.
Emilia felt sweat break out around her hairline. “His last known contact is you. Takes your call, walks out and never comes back. Dead the next morning. You don’t mention it to anybody, just let us run around trying to figure it out, knowing that we’d see the phone records sooner or later.”
Silvio didn’t move. Emilia had a sudden memory of how surprised Lt. Inocente had looked when the crime scene technician had torn open the plastic bag. As if he couldn’t believe that someone he trusted could have done this to him.
“Did you tell Obregon?” Silvio asked.
“You planning on killing us all?” Emilia countered.
Silvio gave her a look of disgust. “I called Inocente,” he said. “Went there and we talked. That’s all.”
“You talked face-to-face?” Emilia asked.
“Yeah.”
“You went all the way to Punta Diamante to talk to him at 10:00 pm?”
“We had business to clear up.”
“It couldn’t wait?”
“Look,” Silvio said. He ran a hand over his crew cut in agitation. “We talked. I saw him go back into the building. He unlocked the door and went in. He had his keys. I never saw him again.”
“Why didn’t you say something?”
“You think Obregon’s going to believe that?”
“No,” Emilia admitted. She wasn’t sure she did. “What did you talk about?”
“Nothing that has anything to do with you.”
“Not good enough, Silvio,” Emilia said.
Silvio shifted uncomfortably. He was a broad man and filled up most of the back seat of the sedan. “We talked for about five minutes outside his apartment building. He said he’d get me what he owed me in a day or so and I went home.”
“He owed you?” Emilia put up her hand, palm out, and Silvio glared at her. “Tell me what you talked about.”
“Leave it alone, Cruz,” Silvio said. “I told you, it’s got nothing to do with anything.”
“Was it a money scam? Trading drugs for counterfeit?”
“Where’d you come up with that shit?” Silvio snarled.
“I think you two were running a money scam. You seen any counterfeit money lately, Silvio?” Emilia fumbled with her bag and got out two of the counterfeit bills that Fuentes had given her.
“Where’d you get that?” Silvio stared at the norteamericano dollars in her hand.
“The ransom for the Morelos de Gama kidnapping was paid in counterfeit dollars,” Emilia said. She kept her hand in her bag. “Just like these.”
“What?”
“Is that what you were talking to el teniente about?” Emilia demanded. If he was going to kill her in the car she at least wanted to know the truth first. “Fake money? Some money laundering deal you had going together?”
“You think you can arrest me, Cruz?” Silvio’s voice was thick with menace.
With her hand still inside her bag Emilia hit the panic button on the key to the nearby Suburban. Silvio jolted back as the piercing siren filled the air. A second later the guard was pulling on the door handle on Silvio’s side and knocking on the tinted window.
“Fuck you, Cruz,” Silvio mouthed.
The door unlocked. The guard wrenched open the door. Emilia silenced the button.
“Sorry,” Silvio said to the guard. “Technical problem.”
The guard looked from Emilia to Silvio and slowly went back to his shack.
Emilia stuffed the counterfeit bills back in her bag. “So now you tell me what you and Inocente talked about and I’ll see if I believe you.”
Silvio scowled. “I run a book,” he said. “Did it when I was suspended and just kept going. Isabel and I use the money to feed some of the neighborhood kids. Inocente put down a bet, lost, and paid up with counterfeit norteamericano dollars. Fake, same as those.”
“He stiffed you?”
“The week before.” Silvio nodded. “Tried to trace it with a couple of my informants but nobody knew anything. I didn’t know what to do and finally decided we had to have it out. I needed the money.”
“You needed it for Monday,” Emilia said slowly. “If you don’t get the accounts settled on Monday the kids don’t eat on Tuesday.”
“My wife is a good woman,” Silvio said. “This means a lot to her. Things haven’t always been easy. She . . . she lost a lot of babies over the years. So these kids on the street . . . they’re like hers.”
Emilia didn’t reply, her brain spinning.
“Look, I didn’t kill him.” Silvio stared at her. “You can call Obregon if you want and he’ll ruin my career but he won’t find any evidence that I killed him. I knew you wouldn’t believe me about the phone call so I just kept my mouth shut figuring we’d find the killer before the records came. Rayos, when was the last time we got phone records that fast?”
Maybe it was the street children or the way he’d seemed so surprised when he saw those bills. “Your story better check out,” Emilia said, praying she wasn’t making a fatal mistake. “You’d better pray that somebody saw you somewhere else besides Lt. Inocente’s building after the time he took that boat out of the marina.”
“I just wanted what he owed me,” Silvio said. “But what did you mean when you said this was a ransom?”
“Do you remember the day Rico and I got a reward for saving the kidnapped kid? Morelos de Gama’s kid?”
Silvio nodded.
“It was the same counterfeit.” Emilia shook the bills. “Just like this.”
“Inocente gave it to you,” Silvio said slowly. “That’s why you thought he and I were doing shit tog
ether.”
“The car we left on the road was full of it and somebody knew,” Emilia said. She told him about being assigned to take Kurt Rucker back to the hotel, finding the army checkpoint gone, and the attack on the highway. “We took the car apart and found the money. A bank told us it was fake,” she finished. “So we left it on the side of the road and the next day the money was gone and the child was in the car.”
“Morelos de Gama paid his kid’s ransom with counterfeit?” Silvio had made no move to close the car door and seemed genuinely confused by the details Emilia had laid out. “Is that what this water company crap’s been all about?”
“I don’t know exactly what happened.” The sun was setting and it would soon be dark. “The Pinkerton agent who worked for the family turned the ransom over to somebody who said he was Lt. Inocente. An accomplice, I guess. He was supposed to do the actual handoff to pay the kidnappers. The Pinkerton agent turned over pesos. But the ransom the kidnappers took in exchange for the child was in counterfeit dollars.”
Silvio shrugged. “So Inocente and his pal switched it. They knew where they could get counterfeit at a discount, did a switch, and kept the real.”
Emilia’s jaw dropped, as if he’d just proven that the world was round. “He switched it,” she repeated. It made perfect sense. “He kept the real money. Arranged for the counterfeit to be used to pay off the kidnappers. Kept both the real ransom and some of the counterfeit to cover his gambling debts.”
“So who was the accomplice?” Silvio asked.
I thought it was you, Emilia wanted to say but didn’t. Alan Denton had said that the man who’d claimed to be Fausto Inocente had looked like a wrestler. Silvio wasn’t the only man who looked like that. She didn’t know what to think.
“Maybe Morelos de Gama found out and killed him.” Silvio pulled out his notebook and thumbed through the pages.
“His alibi checks,” Emilia said. “He was in Chicago with his wife and child at some hospital for amputees.”
“He either contracted it,” Silvio surmised. “Or the kidnappers took out Inocente because they know he delivered fake cash.”
“But what about Lt. Inocente having had sex right before he died?” Emilia asked.
“I didn’t bang him,” Silvio exclaimed.
Emilia almost laughed.
“Look,” Silvio said. “My guess is that Morelos de Gama’s kid got snatched because he’s dealing in somebody else’s territory. Inocente might have been his partner. Tidy source of gambling money that he can’t squeeze out of his brother. Rivals snatch the Morelos de Gama kid to shut down their operation. Inocente sees that there’s an opportunity to get something out of the deal for himself, switches the ransom, but never tells Morelos de Gama. Inocente also pockets a little of the fake stuff thinking it will come in handy at some point.”
“What if he was one of the kidnappers,” Emilia argued. “Morelos de Gama doesn’t know. Just thinks he can help. Bruno Inocente’s brother and all.”
“Maybe.” Silvio sounded skeptical. “But why call the police to deal with a kidnapper when they have Pinkerton? No, I think they were partners and Inocente double-crossed him. Or the accomplice who received the money from Pinkerton double crossed both of them.”
Emilia sat quietly, trying to process this new view of Silvio. He was smart, a linear thinker. Had Obregon hoped to scare Emilia into keeping Silvio out of things, not because he was a dirty cop as Obregon claimed, but because he knew Silvio was a good detective? What part of all of this did Obregon not want them to discover?
“What happened to your partner?” she asked.
Silvio shrugged. “As far as I can tell Fuentes is a calculating rat out to get what he can.”
“I meant Garcia.”
The interior of the car grew very still. Silvio stared straight ahead.
“Besides my wife, he was my best friend,” Silvio finally said.
Emilia waited.
“He was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“Inocente questioned your judgment pretty strongly,” she said.
“Inocente was a fucking asshole.”
Emilia thought about Silvio’s wife, her concern for the barrio’s children and her open manner in speaking with Emilia. Silvio’s wife didn’t live with a man who bashed in skulls and killed friends and then tried to cover it up with layers and layers--.
“Por Dios,” Emilia blurted. The answer was like a bolt from the blue. “The Maxitunnel. He was the partner and it’s their distribution point.”
Silvio turned to look at her. “What the fuck are you talking about?”
“El teniente was interested in tunnel construction,” Emilia said rapidly. “He’d talked to some specialist in hydraulic concrete. Built a strange prototype tunnel with these ventilation holes.”
“The Maxitunnel is the main artery,” Silvio said. “Into Zetas territory.”
“El Machete is a feeder gang for the Zetas,” Emilia said. “There are connections. I’m just not sure what.”
“Keep going,” Silvio said.
The parking lot guard approached the car. Silvio saw him in the side mirror and held his arm outside the car, middle finger raised. The guard slunk back to his shack.
“You remember the head we found?” Emilia said. “Alejandro Ruiz Garcia?”
“Yeah.”
“His cousin, the one who bailed him out, is El Machete,” Emilia said. She took out her notebook. “At first I thought that meant Ruiz was El Machete, too. Now I’m not so sure. At any rate, Ruiz had counterfeit.” Emilia flipped to the timeline. “That’s why he was at the bank when he was arrested so he could find out if it was real or not. So he had it before the ransom was paid.”
Silvio flipped another page in his notebook. “I handled a bank call last week,” he said. “Old lady tried to pass the same counterfeit Inocente gave me. She said her grandson gave it to her.”
“Is he named Horacio?” Emilia clenched her fists in excitement. “He’s Ruiz’s cousin. Definitely El Machete. I talked to him.”
“You went to Los Bongos?” Silvio asked. He’d obviously followed the same trail.
Emilia gave a laugh. “Told the bartender I was pregnant. Horacio was the father.”
Silvio lifted a corner of his mouth in what Emilia assumed was a grudging smile. “So how’d the driver get the ransom counterfeit before it got paid?”
“The Hudsons or Lt. Inocente must have given it to him.” Emilia ran through the rest of the information about the Hudsons, the Inocente’s coinciding hotel stay, and the missing data from the files. They were finally getting close. “Let’s bring in Horacio, get the rest of the story out of him.”
Silvio rubbed his jaw. “Hold on. We got Inocente and Morelos de Gama pushing drugs into Zetas territory. We don’t know exactly which side of this El Machete is working. Maybe for them, flashing Inocente’s friends’ counterfeit and doing their own double-cross. Or they’re working for the Zetas like we think. They snatch the kid and Inocente double-crosses his partner by keeping the real ransom and passing fake to the Zetas.”
“So either El Machete killed Inocente because of the fake ransom,” Emilia reasoned. “Or one of his own partners did.”
Silvio nodded. “Bigger question is, did Morelos de Gama keep the business going? Or did the kidnapping scare him into closing it down?”
It all makes sense, Emilia thought again. The more experienced detective was able to deconstruct everything they had and put it back together in a way that worked.
“If Inocente went to all the trouble to investigate tunnels and cement and shit, my guess is this is too big of an operation for give up,” Silvio went on. “How do you know about this tunnel thing?”
“El teniente built a prototype,” Emilia said. “His brother showed me. Said it was a house. But it’s like a tunnel. A staging area in a tunnel. That’s why he was friends with that cement engineer.”
“We need to figure out how big and how many partners are inv
olved. Gotta be pretty big to get that many people to ignore construction near the Maxitunnel. You remember how to get there?”
Emilia shook a finger at him. “You’d better be playing straight with me.”
“You can believe whatever the fuck you want to, Cruz.”
Emilia wondered if she’d gotten too carried away. Doubt crowded in and pressed down hard.”
Silvio made an abrupt come-on motion.
“I’m not supposed to make any arrests in the case,” she said, like a diver going off the cliff backwards, unable to see, everything on instinct. “Just let Obregon know when I’m close to the killer. He’s supposed to take it from there. Gave me some bullshit story about cleaning up Guerrero.”
“You’re not sleeping with him?”
“No, you pendejo,” Emilia snapped. “He’s the last man on earth I’d ever sleep with.”
Silvio nodded thoughtfully then swung out of the back seat and got behind the wheel again. Emilia threw herself into the front passenger seat.
“Tomorrow I’ll bring the doughnuts,” Silvio said.
Chapter 25
Emilia told Obregon that they were looking into Lt. Inocente’s gambling and sex habits as a major motive for the murder. The detectives had turned up enough to spin a fairly large story and there was probably more to be found if they just kept hunting. Lt. Inocente had gambling tabs at six major casinos, one as far as Zihuatanejo, and routinely bet on horses, dogs, cock-fighting and soccer games. Emilia also played up the fact that Inocente used prostitutes in various locations, inferring that el teniente had possibly run afoul of some of the girls’ keepers.
Obregon asked a few questions but the meeting was brief and tense. If he felt that Emilia was only telling him half a story, he didn’t show it. She came away feeling that his amusement at her rebuff the night in front of the administration building had given way to a dangerous disdain.
It was two days after the visit to the defunct water plant and late afternoon foray to el teniente’s concrete legacy in the middle of nowhere. Armed with a powerful flashlight, Silvio had seen what Emilia had not; a ramp built into the side of the odd concrete structure, the exact width of a sideways garrafon, grooved to keep the jugs from falling off. It was the only metal thing in the structure and mimicked the rolling ramps of the functioning water plant. The finding served to reinforce Emilia’s guess that the Maxitunnel was being used as a transit point.